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Earlier this year, we announced our commitment to build tools specific to the needs of advertisers with large scale campaigns. We call these “Tools for the Power User,” and they’re designed to help our most sophisticated advertisers reach customers at scale, reduce account complexity, and act on data and insights.

Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out a number of these new tools. The first of these is ad customizers, which fits this month’s theme of optimizing creatives at scale.

Real-time creatives at scale

For advertisers with thousands, or even millions of products, showing tailored messages for each product and promotion you’re offering can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Ad customizers let you show highly relevant ads to your customers, in real-time, even when you have thousands (and sometimes millions) of products, services, and promotions—all changing by the day.

For example, ad customizers allowed Extra Space Storage to deliver a relevant, dynamic ad to each of their customers, and scale their ad creation at an incredible rate. Extra Space Storage says: "By using ad customizers to dynamically insert details about price and timing on promotions into our ad text we saw a 113% increase in CTR over our control. Google gave us a solution to the growing need of delivering the right message to the right customer."

How it works

Ad customizers use a number of inputs, such as information about your business, to generate extremely relevant and timely ads. To get started, you’d simply provide business details like product, price, and timing on promotions, and which campaigns, ad groups or keywords they’re relevant for, through a spreadsheet. This information goes into the new Business data section of the Shared library in AdWords, where it can be stored and then accessed when we use it to show an ad.

Then, you create your ad with customizers which are parameters that tell us what information from your spreadsheet you want inserted into your ads. AdWords will dynamically take the product information that is most relevant to what each customer is searching for and insert it into your ad text. This saves you time, and lets you deliver a powerful, customized ad experience to each of your customers, every time.

Driving success

There are a number of different ways to drive success using these highly customizable text ads. With ad customizers, you can

Connect with customers at scale - create a single text ad with hundreds of variations so you can show the most relevant ad to each potential customer

Show real-time calls-to-action - inform consumers when time’s running out on a promotion, in real-time

Optimize workflow - spend less time developing ad copy and re-submitting ads because AdWords will create relevant ads for you

We’re already seeing many advertisers use ad customizers to effectively reach their audience—and their performance goals.

Ben Arabov from the agency Elite SEM, says: “When Elite SEM first learned about ad customizers, we jumped at the opportunity. We believed this feature would incentivize valuable clicks, and our hypothesis was right. Clients saw KPIs improve dramatically—sometimes as much as 2x. This has enabled us to drive incremental performance not only during promotions, but for the long term as well.”

And the agency, Merkle | IMPAQT, used ad customizers to effectively countdown the days to their seasonal promotions, and drive better performance for their customers: “We used the countdown feature to countdown the days until Thanksgiving and holiday deals began. We discovered the click and impression assisted conversions for this ad copy performed at a significantly higher rate than other copy. We also saw higher conversions associated with this copy on Thanksgiving and for about a week after as a result. We'll continue to use ad customizers for seasonal and on going promotions moving forward.”

Getting started

With ad customizers, advertisers get to save time while showing fresher and more relevant ads, and customers see ads with pertinent, up-to-date information that’s closely tied to their search. This is a better user experience for your customers, and helps you drive better performance on your text ads.

This feature will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. For more information on how to get started, visit the AdWords Help Center.